CAIRO: Egyptian stocks gained almost 6 percent on Sunday, with local retail investors seeking bargains across the board and buying into leading stocks like Orascom Telecom, traders said. OT shares gained 7.53 percent to LE 34.42 ($6.18), in part because the firm s GDRs added 6.75 percent on Friday, when the Egyptian market was closed. European and US markets ended October with one of the best weeks on record after weeks of pummeling. Dual-listed Egyptian firms often take their cue from global markets, where volumes are much larger. In turn, these heavily weighted stocks usually give direction to the overall market. The benchmark CASE 30 index ended up 5.85 percent at 4,992.25 points, while the rival Hermes index added 5.93 percent to 450.61 points. The broader CIBC index gained 8.33 percent to 278.80 points. There was a lot of buying across the board, said Teymour El-Derini from Beltone Financial, noting strong gains in construction and shipping firms, as well as investment bank EFG-Hermes , which added 7.18 percent to LE 24.93, Tora Cement gained 10.88 percent to LE 26.30 and Ezz Steel added 14.62 percent to LE 10.66. A number of stocks reached the maximum gain of 20 percent and automatically stopped trading for the day. Local investors were net buyers to the tune of LE 142 billion, stock exchange data showed. Foreigners and non-Egyptian Arabs were both net sellers, but in much smaller volumes. Locals are looking to buy into fundamentally sound and very cheap companies, said Mohamed Seddieq from Prime Securities, naming Talaat Moustafa, which gained 4.17 percent to LE 3.75, as one example. The CASE 30 has lost almost 60 percent of its value since a peak in late-April. It s a back to fundamentals rebound, said Mohamed Kotb, an investment manager at Jazira Asset Management. People are forgetting about the psychological factor and the panic and begin to look at the numbers once again, he said.
